I would assume you mean 16 gig of ram and 2 gig graphics card?.... unless what you mean by 6 months old, is that you found it on the street in a pile of garbage for council pick up 6 months ago!!

The Out of Memory Error has been around for quite some time, and i have even seen it in earlier Galactic Civilisations games. That is how long it has been around. So you could say it is to Stardock what Osama Bin Laden is to America!

Saving the game is a trigger for the out of memory error and the save will not go through and your game will be lost. So you need to put the auto save on for every turn. Auto save happens at the start of each turn, so when it spits the dummy, you only loose 1 turn's worth of work.

There is a memory extention mod around somewhare? - not a fix but greatly extends how long between errors.

What I do to avoid this condition is to start saving at the end of each turn, usually starting around season 50.  About season 100 I drop the game every 45 minutes, load my browser, close my browser and restart the game.  Around season 150 I do this every 30 minutes until I complete the game.  I rarely get the OOM condition unless I push it past 30 minutes of gameplay.  Hope this helps.